Random thoughts and technical bits

NSX Controller forever deploying never working

I ran into an issue with NSX in the home lab where a new NSX controller was deploying and a power outage interrupted the deployment. This left me in a state of deploying forever. After waiting a day and being in the same state I removed the inoperable virtual machine from vCenter. The issue persisted in NSX.

As you can see controller-18 is forever deploying. The NSX manager command line showed it as deploying so it’s a database issue somewhere. Since the deployment action was in place it was impossible to remove the controller and the cluster health was bad with only two controllers. I don’t have any magic method for working with the NSX manager database (I assume it’s postgres but I really don’t know) other than the API. So off to the API I went. First I wanted to query for all controllers to make sure I had the correct name (ID field in picture above). So I setup my REST connection for

https://IP_of_Manager/api/2.0/vdn/controller

I returned that the ID is indeed controller-18. Once I knew the controller number is was a simple delete method with the right command line:

About Author

Joseph Griffiths is a virtualization focused solutions architect who works with complex cloud based solutions. He currently holds many IT certifications including VMware VCDX-DCV and VCDX-CMA #143. This blog represents his random technical notes and thoughts. The thoughts expressed here do not reflect Joseph’s current employer in anyway. You can follow Joseph on Twitter @Gortees